Prof. Mukoma wa Ngugi and Prof. Carole Boyce-Davies gave a public lecture to students in the Humanities Department at Murang’a University of Technology. Mukoma teaches at Cornell University and is a novelist, poet and literary scholar. Boyce-Davies is Chair of the English Department at Howard University and H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters emerita and Professor of Africana Studies and Literatures in English at Cornell University.
Among the East African literary fraternity, Boyce-Davies is well known for her book Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature.
Mukoma’s address centred on the responsibilities of students as citizens of the world. He urged students to have an extended awareness of their blackness bringing to memory liberation icons like Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara. He mentioned Pio Gama Pinto and Malcolm X and their connection to the East African emancipation struggles that is often glossed over. He urged students to be committed to history and to choose their side of the struggle, which should be with the oppressed people.
Boyce-Davies argued for diaspora literacy among students pursuing intellectual connections. She recalled names like James Brown, Marcus Garvey, Bob Marley, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and closer home Jomo Kenyatta and Haile Selassie, stating that students ought to be familiar with diasporic terms and the ideas they evoked.
Among the books that Boyce-Davies has published on the subject of the diaspora are Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies (2003) and Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994). She also co-edited with Ali Mazrui and Isidore Okpewho The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities (1999).
